| Title | Windows 10 Will Soon Ship with a Full, Open Source, GPLed Linux Kernel | |
| Date | Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:01PM | |
| Author | chromas | |
| Topic | ||
| from the year-of-Linux-on-the-desktop dept. | ||
Has no one seen this yet? Don't cross the streams!
Earlier today, we wrote that Microsoft was going to add some big new features to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, including native support for Docker containers. It turns out that that ain't the half of it.
Not even half.
All is changing with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Instead of emulating the Linux kernel APIs on the NT kernel, WSL 2 is going to run a full Linux kernel in a lightweight virtual machine. This kernel will be trimmed down and tailored to this particular use case, with stripped-down hardware support (since it will defer to the host Windows OS for that) and faster booting.
The Linux kernel is GPLed open source; the GPL license requires that any modifications made to the code must be published and made available under the GPL license. Microsoft will duly comply with this, publishing the patches and modifications it makes to the kernel. WSL 2 will also use a similar split as the current WSL does: the kernel component will be shipped with Windows while "personalities" as provided by the various Linux distributions can be installed from the Microsoft Store.
To quote Han Solo, "I've got a bad feeling about this."
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Windows 10 Will Soon Ship with a Full, Open Source, GPLed Linux Kernel on 2024-04-25 19:37:47